jorrit - Outreach Experience . I talked to a friend of [blank] who has a place near the lake about possibly mounting.

I learned that "me explaining how shit works" doesn't really help, even though he has experience as an electrical engineer.

He said, "I think most people just care about fast, cheap, reliable internet." also "I run a restaurant, so I need someone to yell at."

juul: we provide "slow unreliable internet where you only have yourself to blame"

sierk: im kind of surprised this comes up--most people who are two steps away assume it's like comcast but w/o a bill. At an ISP you go, pay your bill, you dont have to worry about anything. But you lose net neutrality, covering people who can't afford it, etc. etc. hidden costs of net neutrality eg netflix getting slower. wouldnt worry about that now, those people, but continue building the network and maybe become reliable at some point. those who want at&t-esque service without the bill

ben - How do we relay this to outreach? We need to center our outreach on building out a network, we need saturation. Our conversation should not be centered on what they get but more about what they can be involved in and how they can contribute

sierk - the hook is that people who want fast internet ...

Jorrit - to clarify, this person was open and into it, offered to share info with building manager. This was just useful feedback that they provided. Doesn't have to be right now; just eventual goals.

...and I brought it up to pursue clarity around to what extent our goal is reliable and affordable internet vs being a project people can be involved in.

mai - should have a meeting about communications framing wrt outreach. prior to that have a bit more clarity on our goals - attempted at strategy meeting - goal for next few months -> 5 years. exciting to have enthusiastic node hosts but could be more deliberate about where and with whom we put our energy

various folks - we'd like more discussion / strategic meeting around this. Let's have more meetings on that.

jeremy - it's not just a strategy meeting but a philosophical meeting about what we're doing as a group

sierke - I heard some folks didn't want more strategy meetings. I do. But the middle ground could be to occasionally use office hours for that, or breakout group on a Tuesday, maybe once a month.

jorrit - +1

Clarification: I have previously pushed back against these meetings, because I felt like we know what we want to do. My resistance was specific to having more meetings that didn't involve more outside participants that could contribute how they would want to be involved with the project, as opposed to more internal discussion.

Proposal: Concretize Formal Relationship w/ Omni (15 mina)

Proposal: Allocate $100/month to Omni in exchange for storage & meeting space usage, plus a percentage of donations or set amount for ballroom space usage for workshops

All groups that utilize the building contribute something financially, which enables the Omni to remain fiscally solvent. we've had a free ride for a minute now, and now have financial resources we can share.

Optional, secondary proposal: We could become a member collective of the Omni, since Sudo Mesh is its own organizational entity with hella upswing right now. It's mostly a position of responsibility: attending 2x meetings per month (via a Delegate representative, tho all meetings are open to the public. any collective can also go 'inactive' after missing 2 meetings and that's totally okay - we all bizzy) + minimum 2 members in Omni working groups (jenny & robb already are). These meeting are super on-point at this point in time and good learnings for anyone interested in representative democracy, consensus processes, and grappling with issues of intersectional oppression. See also: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lQrDIBz1zg5xUl2quCA3RBWvINBnABb6UkWHoVsq400/edit#

It would entail a written poposal and representation at an upcoming Delegates Meeting (1st & 3rd Thursdays @ 7-9pm)

Discussion: Gigabit bandwidth to Omni Commons

Tim connected Mai with someone that can provide bandwidth— He said that we'd need LOS to downtown Oakland to get it

What questions/issues should Mai respond with to see what is possible in terms of access/gear we'd need?

sierk - locksmith has a LOS to downtown Oakland?

mai: what questions should i ask them? issues?

ben: what mounting infrastructure do they have? do they have an AP on site that we can use or do we need our own? point-to-multipoint that we could just link up to, or do we have to mount something on their shiz? Do we need to install from both sides?

benny - how do we prove to them that we have LOS?

ben - we'd just communicate with them about that. What their address?

sierk - if it's just the storage building then we could go with the locksmith

jnny - lynn & jim have a node nearby on Shattuck, could be a possibility

sierk - ed's is a possibility if it's on the lake merritt side of downtown Oakland

mai - would they be comfortable connecting to omni via an intermediate link or only direct to omni? private residence vs community space?

jorrit: why not? seems like it has to happen or

jnny - I'll ping Jehan for thoughts on how to capitalism our way through this

Discussion: Tabling @ Google (5 mins)

via Jenny 3/13:

Tabling @ Google: Jenny's been in correspondance with Greg Keilian, old sudoer who works for Google.org. Wants to support mesh/sudo/omni.

Two proposals from him -

1) invite to table @ the Google campus, collect donations, generate interest. Needs one month lead time. If anyone wants to table, we can suggest dates in April

2) coordinating Google volunteers to help with the project. Google pays the org $10/hr per volunteer and matches any donations. Greg said he'd lean against software dev tasks, probably node mounts are better. Jenny waiting on response re: any liability concerns/requirements from Google.

sierke - There are definitely "bugs" that impact outreach; e.g. access to services like Netflix

grant - We fix bug as we come. Something important to come out of the strategy meeting is to decouple the technical aspects from the projects, since the bugs do get fixed. We could make a clearer outline of bugs

sierke - Services on the mesh? This could be technical. How about documentation to node owners or end users?

ben - Something isn't clear to me — What the purpose of this strategy meeting? Is this about communication and messaging only? (Ben - Just trying to clarify scope)

jeremy - like mai's idea of concrete projects we're working on and create our messaging/outreach plan out of that

ben: jorrit had 2 questions - how do we want to present ourselves? and, what is our end goal? felt there were competing visions about what people want to do and prioritize. can we address diverging goals adequately?

jnny - historically, we advertised "free wireless internet in Oakland" because we thought that would engage people best. However, everyone just looked at us as an ISP.

This is a community project. The only way it's worked so far is for people to share their connections with their ISPs. Expanding the network might give us more options, but at the time we had to move away from presenting ourselves as providing more than a community.

jeremy - do we want this to be a meeting about the philosophy about the organization or concrete goals?

grant - we did a lot of that in the first strategy meeting. Now, we need to nail down how we're presenting ourselves, which is very much what jnny was getting at.

:::: a wild blake arrives :::

mai - I think it's important to have these projects in mind. I don't think we'd want them on fliers. I think it would be helpful to broadcast *how we want to get specific communities connected*. - eg; give a microgrant to alameda? more energy/funds into next byoi workshop? tension between people who feel confident wrt being node owners and those who can't even afford an internet connection and need more support along the way

ben: think one of the things jorrit was curious about was to what extent do our goals prioritize such communities

Reconcile allocation of time, energy, and infra with goals by first reaching out to other communities (as described above) and then allocating physical resources to support communities that are organizing.

i.e. provide workshops at other spaces with folks who live there, then act based on their needs